"The New Deal has been a success"

The New Deal we refer to is the (UK) government's
welfare-to-work scheme. The "success" we refer to
is in creating new jobs.

The fallacy is that "success" in creating jobs
necessarily equates to economic/social success in general
 that job creation is necessarily a "good thing".

The New Deal can be seen as an expensive (total cost:
£5.2 billion) way to create pointless, subsidised slave-jobs
which are of little benefit to anyone. However, the government
spent £18 million of taxpayers' money to advertise the
New Deal  presumably so we wouldn't have this
negative perception.

We had a letter published in the Guardian (15/7/2000)
on this theme:

Dear Editor,
The New Deal has created approximately 50,000 jobs which otherwise
wouldnt exist. But it cost £5bn (five billion)
to set up. By my calculation, that means each job created
cost the taxpayer £100,000.

(Actually, our Guardian letter wasn't
completely fair  the government hadn't spent its full
budget of over £5bn when it announced the creation of
50,000 jobs. The true cost of each job to the taxpayer was
tens of thousands of pounds, not a hundred thousand pounds).

Research by the Employment Policy Institute, Princes
Trust and the Institute for Personnel & Development,
showed widespread abuse of the New Deal by employers.
(Under the scheme, companies receive wage subsidies from the
government and then often renege on their obligation to provide
training).

On the more fundamental fallacy of job creation necessarily
being a good thing, we quote the famous US polymath, Buckminster
Fuller (from his book Critical
Path):

"About 90 percent of all USA employment
is engaged in tasks producing no life-support wealth. These
non-life-support-producing employees are spending three, four,
and more gallons of gasoline daily to go to their non-wealth-producing
jobs  ergo, we are completely wasting $3 trillion of
cosmic wealth* per day in the USA."

*Fuller estimates the value of gasoline
in terms of "cosmic wealth" based on research by
oil geologist Francois de Chardenedes which quantifies the
cost to nature of producing petroleum  eg in terms of
energy employed as heat and pressure.